Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 18, 2006

India Blocks BlogSpot And Other Domains

BoingBoing and many other sites report that Indian government had decided to ban a number of blogs because some terrorist organizations use them to communicate.

"India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*."

Here's a big list of ways to bypass the ban, including Google Translate, proxy servers, TOR and pkblogs.com. I recommend adding the feed to a feed reader.

I still have some readers from India (the percent of visitors dropped from 4% to 2%), so that means not all the ISPs have blocked BlogSpot.com. Obviously, blocking sites is not the solution to stop terrorism, as there are always ways to circumvent the ban and other means of communication.